What are the essential aspects of melodrama Essay

What are the essential aspects of melodrama - Essay ExampleMelodrama could be part of a play, a film, or a book. Today it is employed effectively in television serials also. It could take the form of a tragedy, a comedy, a romance or adventure. Melodrama has been used since the early nineteenth century.According to George Rowell, (1968), pp 450-451, who had reviewed the book The adult male of Melodrama by Frank Rahill, the account has the merits of a wide range and considerable detail. Manifestations of melodrama on both sides of the Atlantic are covered, and Rahills careful handling of the French form is notable. Melodrama was long dismissed by literary critics as good theatre but bad drama. Melodrama was more to do with quantity than quality, and appealed more to the shopping mall than the mind. One of the chief merits of melodrama was the vitality that it possessed.Films During the last forty years, Douglas Sirk and his family melodramas have achieved an almost legendary status in film studies. Sirks work has been critically acclaimed since the 1950s and he is universally defined as the incitive master of melodrama. Some of his works are Magnificent Obsession (1954), Written on the Wind (1957), and put on of Life (1959). He was dedicated to critiquing the bourgeoise. The sophisticated family melodramas of Sirk and others realized the genres historical capability to forge as a revolutionary form during times of cultural struggle. Sirk demonstrated how melodrama often considered a unimportant genre, could achieve the status of a serious artistic and cultural form. (Barbara Klinger, 1994, pp.xi-xii).The relationship between melodrama and the prevailing ideology, elaboration and history can be noted. Critics have continually interpreted individual films as responses to times of discipline and social crises from the moral dilemmas of post-revolutionary France to the class conflicts and forbidding sexual mores of the Victorian era,